IV. EQUIDAD DE GÉNERO, DERECHOS, CIUDADANIA Y EMPODERAMIENTO
4.1 Equidad de Género, Ciudadanía y Derechos de las Mujeres
A fourth personal reflection cycle was performed after the evaluation of Team E5 (the management team).
7.6.1 Reflective pause: After core action research projects
One significant outcome of the evaluation of the shared leadership data was that the management team showed shared leadership avoidance for the shared leadership decision- making competence. Only a few members of the management team seemed to take decisions. In comparison to the other evaluated teams, which showed at least low shared leadership competence, the expectation was that the management team would be strong with regard to decision making.
The practitioner was a bit unsure as to how to deliver the message to the strong management team that the data evaluation indicated that the decision-making ability of the self-organising management team was at the level of shared leadership decision-making avoidance.
After reflection on how to deliver the bad message (bad from the practitioner’s perspective) to a team of leaders, the following strategy was adopted: first show some of the good results of the team; subsequently, show the graph indicating leadership avoidance of the decision- making leadership attribute.
that they were bad in terms of shared decision making. One of the management team members said, ‘Every good decision takes at least fourteen days’. This implied that the management was aware of the situation of bad decision-making competence; the current investigation only quantified what was already qualitatively known to the team.
This experience was important: not every message that seems to be bad is really bad because sometimes, people are quite aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and they only need a trigger from outside to really work on the weaknesses. Gaining this experience helped the practitioner to grow as a leader because it gave confidence in what the researcher was doing in research, even if the expected results of the research study were not in line with what everyone expected. This experience allowed the practitioner to improve leadership knowledge and to grow as a researcher.
7.6.2 Description: Concrete experience
The outcome of the data evaluation of the management team revealed that the decision making attribute of the shared leadership for the management team showed leadership avoidance. This was different from what the self-organising teams had for the decision making attribute because all the team members had the shared leadership attribute of low shared leadership.
7.6.3 Reflective observations
The main purpose of the cycle with the surrounding management team was to figure out how organisational decision making was performed. The practitioner’s expectation was that the management team would show the same behaviour as the teams in the organisation did; thus, it was expected that the decision-making competence would have been given from the management team to the self-organising teams. However, this expected behaviour was not witnessed in the observed case. It seems that the self-organising teams took decisions; the teams were not reluctant to take decisions even if not all the team members in the team were able to take decisions. Therefore, only a few members took decisions; overall, the teams were in the quadrant of low shared leadership. It can be concluded that leadership avoidance was not inherited by the teams from the management team because the teams showed shared leadership.
7.6.4 Conceptualisation
The findings do not seem to confirm what some prior studies had suggested (Bergmann and De Meuse, 1996; Bergman et al., 2012). Prior scholars found that a self-organising team might be reluctant to take decisions that used to be taken by the management team previously.
However, in the observed case, the opposite seems to be true: the self-organising teams took the decisions while the management team did not. It seems to be the case that shared leadership, especially the decision-making attribute, can be better in a self-organising team than in a surrounding management team.
Self-organising development teams focus and rely heavily on individual competencies as critical success factors for the team. A self-organising development team needs a common focus; further, a vision and a rapid decision-making process are required to be successful (Cockburn and Highsmith, 2001). There seems to be a difference between a self-organising management team consisting of managers (who might have different objectives) and a self- organising team that follows a common goal.
7.6.5 Action plan
The evaluation of Teams E1–E4 showed that all the teams had low shared leadership in the decision-making area. One possible assumption is that the research instrument did not correctly reflect the decision-making capabilities of a team. However, the result for Team E5 (the management team) clearly indicated that the team showed leadership avoidance, which was different from the leadership behaviour for decision making for Teams E1–E4. For future evaluations, it might be useful to investigate not only self-organising teams but also the surrounding organisational management team/structure.